Takamine Hideko

[Roger Macy]

Yes, She was a mesmerising actress.  Above all for me, she was the centre of Ukigumo, which I believe gets many votes from Japanese critics as their favourite film.  She is number one in the lavishly illustrated 'Mikio Naruse with Actresses', 2005.  It would be wonderful to have her memoirs translated but for us more linguistically challenged, the Jinbocho theater this summer was selling Joyu Takamine Hideko at 1200 yen, which was packed with stills from her films., as well as a filmography.

Carmen Comes Home would be a revelation as she exists for me entirely in black-and-white.
Roger
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <mccaskem at georgetown.edu>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: Takamine Hideko


>I showed my students 24 Eyes a few weeks ago. We saw it as a follow-up to 
> Kon's Millennium Actress, in which the main character is a composite, mainly of 
> Takamine Hideko and Hara Setsuko.
> 
> The students were moved and surprised - they'd never seen a Japanese film like 
> this before, and one wrote her term paper about it.
> 
> I mentioned in class that the irony was that Kon was gone in his forties, while 
> the two actresses he referenced in Millennium Actress were still with us. But now 
> Takamine is gone as well.
> 
> She wrote a 2-volume book of memoirs, which should be translated. She and 
> Kurosawa had a sort of bittersweet romance back around 1940-41, when she 
> starred in Uma, and Kurosawa was the first assistant director. I believe he first 
> directed scenes on his own in this film, and worked directly with her quite a bit. 
> She was very much younger than he, in her teens, and was a big star, while he 
> was still just starting out in his career and past 30. So it couldn't and didn't 
> amount to much in the end. She discusses it in her memoirs, written decades 
> later.
> 
> Her earliest performance on US-playable DVD may be in Tokyo Chorus/Tokyo 
> no Korasu, 1931, in the box set Silent Ozu. Two decades later she starred in 
> Carmen Goes Back Home, post-WWII, which was I believe the first color film 
> made in Japan, and is very entertaining. She was a truly great actress, and a 
> notable writer in her later years as well.
> 
> Michael McCaskey
> Georgetown Univ.
>
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